There is no such thing as Mary Poppins

Celebrities, we know, can be used to sell almost anything, but does this include methods of childrearing? Rachel Waddilove's new guide, The Baby Book, comes with the imprimatur of Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin. Waddilove parachuted into the Paltrow-Martin household after the births of both Apple and Moses to put in place the "structured schedule" that she's now hoping to spread.

Of course this yearning for someone to bustle, Mary Poppins-like, into the disorienting maelstrom that is postnatal life and magic it into harmony is something I can utterly empathise with. On the other hand, I'm not altogether sure it's the panacea that it's touted as. I sort of knew that myself, even in the darkish early days after my first child was born.

Then, I allowed myself to be persuaded that a part-time mother's help might ease me through those endless first weeks. Almost everything about the young woman I hired for three mornings a week made me feel worse. Aged 19, she was the mother of a four-year-old, and even though her boyfriend had died in a motorbike accident, she never complained, making it harder for me to do so. I was struggling with breastfeeding; she was an enthusiast for the bottle. Her presence was meant to gratify the fantasy that, for at least a few hours a week, I could be child-free again. But I couldn't, and I knew it, and so was secretly relieved when she kept phoning in with a cold or a sick child. The arrangement soon fizzled out: escape from my child wasn't going to make me feel better - it was more handling, and not less, that would breed confidence. And so it turned out to be.

Now I don't know anything about the Paltrow-Martin household, but I did bristle at Gwynnie's endorsement of the Waddilove technique, that resulted in "Apple... sleeping through the night in a six- to seven-hour stretch by six weeks". It's hard not to wish colic and worse upon mothers who kvell about their child's precocious sleeping habits, and who never question the shibboleth of early sleeping through the night.

If this is your main aim, it's quite easy to achieve. Indeed there's a touch of the Truby Kings about most childcare manuals (except perhaps Penelope Leach's). Frederic Truby King was the New Zealand doctor whose prescriptive advice terrorised mothers in the first three or four decades of the century into feeding their babies only every four hours, no matter how distraught parent or child might be in the meantime. Taming the anarchy of newborns has been the goal of most mother-and-baby books since.

But in my experience, these books perpetuate the very thing that they're written to reduce - maternal anxiety. By suggesting that there's a correct or best way to raise a baby, they interfere with the process by which mothers discover which way works best for them. Because, of course, there's no formula to childrearing. Even the shrine of "controlled crying" is not one all parents can worship at: how much bawling you can tolerate before you step in to comfort, pretty much depends on how your own crying was dealt with when you were an infant.

Similarly, Waddilove's proposal that the baby be given a bottle in the night to relieve the breastfeeding mother is good advice for someone desperate for sleep but, since it reduces the milk supply, bad for someone desperate to establish breastfeeding. Since children need to be integrated into their parents' lives, which differ, there can't possibly be a one size fits all method of childrearing. Advice from someone trusted when one feels vulnerable is precious but, ultimately - if we listen - our children teach us (sometimes brutally) to be the parents they need.

Waddilove has said that she does everything after the arrival of a baby except clean the home, but that's precisely, I think, what needs farming out. They may say "sleep when your baby does and ignore the housework", but bearing all that external chaos alongside the internal turmoil is tough. This is why, in some traditional cultures, friends and relatives rally round to cook and clean for up to six weeks, leaving the mother free to concentrate on getting to know her baby.

Naomi Stadlen, author of What Mothers Do, the best book in the world on motherhood, says this about the advice industry: "Rarely is it necessary to tell a mother what to do. It may demoralise her further, and certainly does not help her to learn. A mother needs to feel safe enough to risk feeling uncertain." Even a celebrity mother.

What Mothers Do: Especially When it Looks Like Nothing, by Naomi Stadlen (Piatkus, £9.99); The Baby Book: How to Enjoy Year One, by Rachel Waddilove (Lion Hudson, £7.99).